News

Sharjah has set themselves the mission of becoming “the premier reading festival for children in the region.” It’s hard to think of any children’s reading festival that competes: Cairo closed […]

The 2012 Palestine Festival of Literature opens in just two short weeks. Organizers have set themselves an even greater-than-usual challenge this year in that the fest is set to be […]

“Of all the pieces we’ve ever published,” Words Without Borders wrote yesterday on Facebook, “we get the most queries about Magdy El Shafee’s graphic novel Metro.“ You know the story: […]

This reading, organized by the “Al Mutanabbi Street Starts Here” project, was held last month at the Double Elephant Print Workshop in the UK. Al-Mutanabbi founder Beau Beausoleil notes about […]

Several dozen poets and scholars are set to appear at Tripoli’s first post-Ghaddafi International Poetry Festival at the end of this month. The festival boasts a number of poetic stars, […]

For those of us in Cairo, it seems that Shorouk Bookstores is offering the best WB & CD discount, at 20%, but other stores (BookSpot), chains (Alef), and government entities (GEBO) […]

I reviewed the Humphrey Davies translation of Elias Khoury’s As Though She Were Sleeping last August. Now, the Marilyn Booth translation is out from Archipelago, and Khoury is roaming the US giving interesting talks (such as this one in New York); thus, it was time for a review of the second translation.

And really must see me talk about the blog as literary salon, well: No, I have no idea what I’m doing with my hands.

Then on Tuesday, news came that the Arabic edition of Blasim’s first, excellent collection — Madman of Freedom Square — had been banned in Jordan, a country that was supposed to have scrapped censorship back in 2007.